2004-03-28 mail2.hsphere.cc

[jjay]

I understand Admin, keeping the costs low for us is good! One of the many good things about Vortech. The techs do a great job and even with a hard drive failure you get it right back up! I was only suggesting a Raid but point well taken and I completely understand.

With everything working now we must say to ourselves.
How cool is it that it was a Sunday

[nhdonny]

I'm cool with keeping the techs and appreciate how well you guys perform.

So how many Daves would it take to get us one Raid?

We'll sell Dave and elderly female relatives for hardware. Make us an offer.

[Silverbug]

do we get this guy too?

or do you need him to keep the servers running

Hows the drive replacement going?

[nelsonke]

Originally Posted by admin

So our take on it is keep the cost low for us and you, make sure you have a really good backup system. We have 2.6 TB of backup for the systems now and may be adding anther 1 to 2 TB soon as well to keep up with the amount of systems.

Thanks for your consistent effort to provide the best service at a low price. I take it from the comment above that you back up some/all? servers on your 2.6 TB of backup? Can you explain a little what gets backed up, and how often, or point me to where I can read about it. Just trying to keep learning.

[admin]

We backup everything once every 24 hours. We backup all system files we would need, and all user home drives. We have about 600Gb or so room left on the 2 2.6TB systems. So thats why I said we might add more. These systems are fully raid5 as well for best speed and failuer protection.

We don't back up mail... 73GB of little files would eat way too much bandwidth...

[jmbeach]

Matt, don't you just hate having to contradict the boss?

This is off the subject of mail2, but any ETA when the mail1 queue will start to head south? I sent myself test emails over an hour ago that still haven't come back.

[tkraffty]

Just a couple of comments about RAID...

Someone said...

A server that cost around $1200 to $1400 would jump to well over $2300 to $2500 each.

I understand the cost issues you noted, but it seems to me that having the kind of protection and redundency that RAID offers would be well worth the extra $1000 per machine - especially when I do some rough math in my head, figuring you allow at least 250 paying accounts per machine.

I've heard mentioned around here that you handle 20,000 IPs through the data-center, and another message from long ago said something about more than 10,000 accounts here, but either way, even if you stick with the minimal estimated account-per-server numbers, that would seem to yield a pretty hefty monthly revenue of which Vortech could use just a little more to better protect their customers and still maintain the great "low-cost" service.

Yes, this added security would cut into the profits a bit more, but I always say it's better to have less of something, than more of nothing. And who knows... maybe there'll be a time when there's just one too many lost database or e-mail drive, or a half-day (or more) site outage that just pushes too many of your current customers over the edge... at which point, NOT having RAID would be more costly to your business - yes?

All that having been said -- I know I'll most likely lose the RAID argument today, so here's another item I noticed:

...we use the best drives we can find for our system and data drives with the best cooling to make them last there life time AVG 5 years

So, if RAID isn't coming to the data-center anytime soon, then perhaps you should operate your facilities like airplane and jet maintenance crews do... Regardless of how well some part of an aircraft is performing at any given moment, mechanics will replace specific parts according to a set-schedule based on expected wear-rates -- no matter what -- just to improve the odds that nothing will break mid-flight...

Using that comparison, maybe your data-center staff could just make sure to regularly replace any hard-drive that is older than 6 to 12 (or some X-number of) months. Since you can buy a a six-pack of 9-Gig drives for about $30 these days, maybe *that* is a level of extra cost for extra protection that wouldn't cut too terribly into the profits? Of course, your customers would likely get tired of the monthly e-mails saying "we're replacing a drive again - for your protection..."

So maybe I'll just stop thinking out loud and just go back to my hole now

Originally Posted by tkraffty

<snip>
So, if RAID isn't coming to the data-center anytime soon, then perhaps you should operate your facilities like airplane and jet maintenance crews do... Regardless of how well some part of an aircraft is performing at any given moment, mechanics will replace specific parts according to a set-schedule based on expected wear-rates -- no matter what -- just to improve the odds that nothing will break mid-flight...

Using that comparison, maybe your data-center staff could just make sure to regularly replace any hard-drive that is older than 6 to 12 (or some X-number of) months.

I believe the bad drive was actually a new Seagate Cheetah that was installed during maintenance and upgrades in October.

Go to your room.

[Brangwyn]

Raids great in theory .. until your controller craps out and decides to randomly stripe your drives ... trust me on that one!

.......or if two of the drives die simultaneously, I've seen that one. And you previously figured, "We've got raid! who needs backups......."

[bizniz]

Originally Posted by alexc

Looks like mail2 crashed hard with a possible master HD failure. The machine is being brought in for repair or replacement.

No mail data is expected to be lost.

I have an email at my fulltime employer, who hosts through me, as a reseller. The email address also forwards to my home address, and I had an e-mail yesterday that was sent at 2:40 pm, that never arrived yesterday afternoon, but did arrive at home, but did not come up with first check of mail this am at work, either. The attachments were only about 90 mb total of 2 word files.

It had an attachment, and as a test, our network consultant has sent himself an e-mail to his home e-mail, and any without attachments appear instantaneously, and those with still had not appeared a half hour or more later, even though under 2 meg in size. With the hard drive updates, did something change in the virus checking that is causing more of a delay with mail currently?

Please advise, by e-mail to my reseller e-mail address(es) on file. Thanks.

- Becky Venneman
Virtual Bizniz

[Vixen]

If you wish for a tech to reply to you via email instead of via a post, I would recommend submitting a TT.

[bizniz]

Originally Posted by Vixen

If you wish for a tech to reply to you via email instead of via a post, I would recommend submitting a TT.

I just realized there is now an option to have replies, and updates to forum e-mailed to you, which I have done. I guess I can try trouble ticket if need to, but seems to relate to issues already experiencing with mail servers, so decided to try forum first.